"King Lear" on a sunny afternoon; "As You Like It" in the cool dark of a late summer evening. Strange juxtapositions are par for the course at Shakespeare festivals. But even the inherent disconnect in watching Lear rage against the storm in a sun-drenched redwood grove pales beside seeing his hard-hearted daughter Goneril return as a radiant cowgirl Rosalind -- or the scheming Edmund transformed into a sublimely comic-melancholy Jaques.

Shakespeare Santa Cruz has mounted a strong 25th anniversary season, with its two solid Shakespearean outings in the Festival Glen and a bright, sightly offbeat version of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" on its indoor stage. As added attractions, Artistic Director Paul Whitworth has thrown in two special events that cast further light on the main offerings.

On Aug. 22, Whitworth and festival veteran Ursula Meyer will perform "Dear Liar," Jerome Kilty's dramatization of the letters of Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for whom he wrote the role of Eliza Doolittle. On Aug. 15 and 22, the company's interns will perform "Fools in the Forest," an adaptation of Nahum Tate's 1681 adaptation of "King Lear," in which the bad guys are defeated and the good Cordelia and Edgar become queen and king while Lear lives on in happy retirement. As silly as it seems to us today, it was Tate's version that dominated the English stage for almost 150 years.

It's also not as radical a rewrite as we might think. As Michael Warren's enlightening program note points out, Shakespeare's tragedy is the first known account of the ancient tale in which Lear and Cordelia die. The ending of Skip Greer's Santa Cruz "Lear" is slightly different from the usual stage version as well, but that's because the director is using the first printed (First Quarto) text of 1608. Most productions, and most editions, combine passages from the First Quarto and the posthumous 1623 Folio (each contains many lines that the other doesn't). This may be the first staging to solely rely on the Quarto text.

It's an experiment that works pretty well. Aficionados may miss some familiar lines, but the story is bold and clear. Greer's staging is forceful and, for the most part, sure-handed. Some excellent performances anchor the somewhat uneven cast, and Lawrence Hecht's vibrant, magnetically tormented Lear dies in the end, plaintively mourning Mary McCool's duly dead Cordelia.

Longtime American Conservatory Theater mainstay Hecht depicts Lear as a robust, convivial but peremptory ruler at the outset, trapped into disowning his favorite daughter Cordelia by acute public embarrassment. He's so wrapped up in boisterous companionship that he's slow to see how much his power has been undermined by Kate Eastwood Norris' crafty, driven Goneril -- much slower than Craig Wallace's mournfully witty Fool. His rage against the storm and decline into madness are laced with lightning-strike, penetrating insights into the human condition.

It's a very pagan "Lear." In Greer's staging, Lear's invocations of the gods carry palpable weight. Norris reacts to his curse of barrenness as if her womb were withering at his words. It's also a "Lear" in which the sub-tragedy of Gloucester (a thoughtful but not forceful Michael Rudko) and his sons achieves considerable resonance, thanks to Dan Donohue's sharply etched, rivetingly amoral Edmund and Christopher Oden's thoughtfully delineated, manly Edgar (not to mention Martin Noyes' inventive fight direction).

A few competent but underwhelming performances in strategic roles lessen the thrust of Greer's staging, as does the use of John Zeretzke's intriguingly eclectic, but too obviously canned, percussive score to represent the final battle. But for the most part, this is a solid, often forceful "Lear." It's also a striking and well thought-through Lear as depicted by Hecht, one that raises the hair on the back of your neck when he howls over his lost Cordelia.

B. Modern's time- and culture-traveling costumes -- fur-lined regal robes and high-waisted gowns evoking a cross between medieval Europe and Japan, Elizabethan England and "Star Wars" -- turn to a more "Oklahoma!"-style frontier palette for Aaron Posner's "As You Like It." Zeretzke and musical director Moira Smiley's buoyant vocal settings of Shakespeare's songs make delightful use of country-western and early bebop motifs. The austere bright red panels and stone towers of Dipu Gupta's "Lear" set give way to a broad, bare platform stage, and David Lee Cuthbert's lights -- which managed to evoke flashes of lightning even on a sunny afternoon -- bathe the nighttime stage in southwestern sunshine.

Posner also takes a radical approach to the text, cutting some of the comedy's well-known scenes, overlapping scenes and inserting absent characters to speak the lines ascribed to them by others. It's a kind of storybook approach, with the actors in gingham, denim and broad hats creating the groves and fields of the Forest of Arden in our imaginations on the bare stage and amid the trees and hillsides of the amphitheater, and a chorus that pops up through a trapdoor to regale us with song.

It's also beguilingly performed. Norris is a delightful Rosalind, drawing us in to share her fear of the unknown when she's exiled by the evil Duke Frederick (a wonderfully sleazy-nasty Hecht), who'd usurped her father's lands. Her solid bond with McCool's Celia sets the foundation for their adventures in Arden, and their forbidden-fruit titillation at the idea of Rosalind disguising herself as a man (she's a lovely, lanky, tentative youth) nicely prepares the way for the sexual-tension comedy of her mock-wooing scenes with the unsuspecting Orlando (a sunnily brash Cody Nickell, in stark contrast to his insinuating henchman Oswald in "Lear").

Posner and Donohue create one of the funniest Jaques ever seen, with the black-garbed Donohue exploiting Jaques' melancholy for sharply etched character comedy -- and delivering an astonishingly original, hilarious "seven ages of man." Oden ably complements Donohue as a wry, dry, world-wise clown Touchstone, nicely paired with Shannon Warrick's clueless goatherd Audrey. Sofia Ahmad, an uncertain Regan in "Lear," is comically zesty as Phoebe, the peasant who falls for the man she thinks Rosalind is, as she in turn is pursued by Richard Thieriot's banjo-picking, love-besotted Silvius.

The whole ensemble -- mostly the same as in "Lear" -- looks good in Posner's deceptively easygoing, finely tuned staging. It isn't "As You Like It" as you generally like it, but it's more than likable.

Director Randy White's take on "Pygmalion" isn't the usual one either. The text is the standard Shaw comedy on which "My Fair Lady" is based (and from which most of its best lines come). The key difference here is in Whitworth's performance as the erudite, arrogant, unself-consciously misogynistic phonics professor Henry Higgins.

It's a well thought-out, beautifully delineated and somewhat risky characterization. Whitworth makes Higgins as keen-witted, obsessive, iconoclastic, callous and willful as ever, hitting his punch lines with unerring timing. But he pushes the privileged slovenliness a little further, tossing not only coats aside but also half-eaten apples and banana peels, knowing someone will pick up after him. He goes even further, giving us a Higgins as unfit for society as his mother (a coolly commanding Beth Dixon) says he is -- not just because he has no use for politeness, but because he's so unconscious of his surroundings that he keeps walking into walls and falling over wastebaskets.

The slapstick works surprisingly well, particularly with the grace notes of Julia Coffey's Eliza, such as her wondrously uncouth titter-snigger of a laugh. Coffey not only hits the right Cockney snivels and yowls, her cowering flower girl shows the streaks of independence early on that will come to fruition as she blossoms in the fine period gowns of Lydia Tanji.

Unfortunately, White's cast isn't consistent and his pacing is erratic. The opening drags a bit, as do the usually sure-fire scenes with Eliza's "undeserving poor" father Alfred Doolittle, in Gary Armagnac's well-phrased but too deliberate delivery. The scene changes take too long on Louisa Thompson's handsome set, creating a loss of momentum despite Gregg Coffin's energetic score. Besides Tom Blair's stolid Colonel Pickering and Laura Kenny's formidable Mrs. Pearce, few of the actors can hold their own with Whitworth and Coffey.

It's still a "Pygmalion" as provocative about class and women's rights as Shaw could wish. It just isn't completely, well ... loverly.